Years before he became a successful Melbourne barrister and wrote an important legal textbook, Nimal Wikramanayake, QC, was such an unsuccessful personal injury lawyer that he got fired.
“I would write 20 pages on the law,” he says. “All they wanted to know is if the driver was liable. They sacked me.”
A member of a prominent Sri Lankan legal family, Wikramanayake’s career provides a rare insight into the indifference, hostility and racism faced by some foreign-born lawyers in Australia.
Wikramanayake, whose niece was recently selected as Macquarie Group’s next chief executive, was a barrister in Colombo, where the court system operated in English.
When a socialist government took over in 1970 the courts switched to Sinhalese, which was a second language for Wikramanayake.
Fearing his language skills weren’t strong enough to compete, he moved to Melbourne and found a job in 1971 as a personal injury and workers compensation solicitor.
A sacking and tears
Wikramanayake’s interest in the legal framework governing motor-vehicle accidents wasn’t appreciated by his employers. In the relatively low-paying-and-charging corner of the legal world, he was expected to provide succinct analyses of who was responsible – an expectation he failed to meet.
Being terminated was traumatic. “I was crying in the car,” he says. Fortunately his wife was present to offer comfort and advice. “Go to the bar,” he says she said.
Wikramanayake checked with the few other Sri Lankan solicitors in Melbourne if they thought a dark-skinned barrister could generate enough work to survive. The response was unambiguous. “You are mad,” he says they told him.
Now 85, Wikramanayake says he was the only non-white barrister in Melbourne at the time. As a minority of one, the well-educated Wikramanayake (he got his law degree at Cambridge University) felt Melbourne’s clubby legal world didn’t embrace outsiders.
“The first 10 years was very hard,” he says. “The Victoria bar are bloody racists. They put me on legal aid. They put me on a load of crap. The Victorian bar is a bloody private club.”
‘I felt sorry for him’
Victoria’s first non-white barrister was William Ah Ket, who was born in Wangaratta in 1876 to Chinese immigrants, according to the Victoria Bar Council.
The Bar Council, which oversees barristers, is currently showing an exhibition in Melbourne of 700 barristers’ photographic portraits designed to illustrate the racial and sexual changes since 1937, when a caricature illustration of the city’s barristers showed 172 white men and two white women.
An act of human goodwill changed Wikramanayake’s luck. One day he decided to say hello to an older, slightly shabbily dressed man hanging around the barristers’ chambers.
“I felt sorry for him,” Wikramanayake says. “I didn’t realise he was the greatest property lawyer in Australia.”
The man was Louis Voumard, QC, a barrister whose name is still synonymous with the study of Australian property.
Success in property law
Voumard’s The Sale of Land in Victoria was sold to other lawyers by the page, which meant it could keep them updated on changes and developments in the law. When he died in 1974, Voumard’s publishers asked Wikramanayake continue the service.
Under Wikramanayake’s control and carrying the late Voumard’s name, the service flourished. Property was an important economic driver, and the barrister with the long surname (it is pronounced Wik-Ra-Man-a-Yaa-Ka) became one of field’s leading advocates.
Eventually The Sale of Land was published as a book. Several decades later it was placed it on a list of Australia’s 20 most influential law texts. In 2002 Wikramanayake was made senior counsel.
Despite his success, Wikramanayake felt the Victorian bar didn’t truly accept him. In 2012 he sought to become chairman of his barristers’ chambers. “What do the bastards do?” he says. “They appointed a young silk as chairman. It was racism.”
An ‘inspiration’ for the bar
Professions such as law have become more conscious in recent decades about latent prejudice. In the past two years the Victorian Bar Council has begun promoting a national policy designed to help female barristers win roles in complicated and lucrative court cases.
The Victorian Bar Council president, Matt Collins, QC, says Wikramanayake is an “inspiration” to Victorian barristers and a “pioneer” in an Anglo-Saxon-dominated industry.
“It is because of experiences of people like Nimal that the demography of the bar has changed so dramatically and the experiences of those who came after him have so much improved,” Collins says.
Nine per cent of Victorian barristers speak a language other than English at home and 15 per cent are foreign-born, according to the Bar Council.
Gender v racial equality
Wikramanayake, who acknowledges he sometimes has a volatile personality, says the industry’s leaders care more about sexual equality than racial equality, and uses an anecdote to make his point.
“One young barrister came to see me [while I was in conversation with another person] and said ‘what’s the nig-nog telling you?'” Wikramanayake says.
Wikramanayake says he complained to the then chairman of the Bar Council, and was told that the younger barrister should be counselled. Wikramanayake wasn’t satisfied.
“I said to her ‘if I was a woman you would take me seriously, but because I am a black bastard you don’t care.’
“It’s all about bloody women. Nobody gives a damn about us. This is a bloody racist state.”
The incredible family story behind one of Australia’s top chief executives, Shemara Wikramanayake. In AFR Weekend.
Clarification: Mr Wikramanayake was initially a Senior Counsel, as originally stated, and changed the designation to Queens Counsel when the law changed in Victoria.
Source: From the Australian Financial Review. – Sept 21st – 2018